From: cyrilsmith-at-cix.compulink.co.uk (Mr C Smith)

Subject: Re: Freedom and necessity.

Dear Andy,

I think your remarks about freedom and necessity are important. Hegel was battling against Kant's separation of the world and our thoughts about it. For Kant, summing up the Enlightenment, freedom belonged to individuals. Reason could not decide between freedom and necessity without falling into contradiction. Hegel tried to bring the whole thing together as the historical development of self-conscious Spirit. This implied going beyond individual freedom, which could never get higher than philosophy listening-in to what Spirit had been up to, until yesterday. I think that Marx's critique of Hegel involved, among many other things, recovering on a higher level the Enlightenment view of the individual, but now embodied in a free association of social individuals. As I pointed out in my Communist Manifesto piece, 'Marxism' lost this point completely, so that we misread 'the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all' as if it said exactly the opposite, making the collective the condition for individual freedom. (I was put on to this idea by Jose-Carlos Ballon, whom I met in Lima.)

Cyril